Future pathways for eVTOLs: A design optimization perspective

TL;DR

This paper presents a multidisciplinary design optimization framework for eVTOL aircraft, integrating economic, regulatory, and sustainability factors to compare different design strategies and stakeholder priorities in urban air mobility.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optimization framework and a new metric, the cross-transportation Figure of Merit, for evaluating eVTOL designs against various transportation modes.

Findings

Optimized eVTOL designs reveal trade-offs between profitability, sustainability, and operational flexibility.

The framework enables stakeholder-centric design objectives considering regulatory and technical constraints.

The cross-transportation FoM allows comprehensive comparison of eVTOL with road, rail, and air transport modes.

Abstract

The rapid development of advanced urban air mobility, particularly electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, requires interdisciplinary approaches involving the future urban air mobility ecosystem. Operational cost efficiency, regulatory aspects, sustainability, and environmental compatibility should be incorporated directly into the conceptual design of aircraft and across operational and regulatory strategies. In this work, we apply a novel multidisciplinary design optimization framework for the conceptual design of eVTOL aircraft. The framework optimizes conventional design elements of eVTOL aircraft over a generic mission and integrates a comprehensive operational cost model to directly capture economic incentives of the designed system through profit modeling for operators. We introduce a novel metric, the cross-transportation Figure of Merit (FoM), to compare the optimized eVTOL system with various competing road, rail, and air transportation modes in terms of sustainability, cost, and travel time. We investigate four objective-specific eVTOL optimization designs in a broad scenario space, mapping regulatory, technical, and operational constraints to generate a representation of potential urban air mobility stakeholder-centric design objectives. The analysis of an optimized profit-maximizing eVTOL, cost-minimizing eVTOL, sustainability-maximizing eVTOL, and a combined FoM-maximizing eVTOL design highlights significant trade-offs in the area of profitability, operational flexibility, and sustainability strategies. This underlines the importance of incorporating multiple operationally tangential disciplines into the design process, while also reflecting the diverse priorities of stakeholders such as operators, regulators, and society.